There are many ways to animate in Flash and the best way is always scripting, or I mean code in AS3.  Flash has grown up quite a bit and now has a very fun coding language in AS3, when programming games or animations scripting is the way to go. You can even do stuff like make a SMTP server/client using mime in it, ok maybe more useful is a binary socket asset loader.

The default mx.transitions classes in AS2 were good, there are much better filter and transition tools now in AS3 but also a bit more bulky than needed and many good animation kits have come along that help people animate with script.  This can be great for team development when architecture is set within everyone’s styles, animation packages for example help to make it easy to have common code so that people can easily understand it. It can be bad when it comes to flash development when you open other’s work if they do not use  at least some standard kits or conventions.

There are a few really excellent animation packages that you should know about.

The best AS3 animation packages

1. Animation Package (AS3 kit here)
2. Tweener (samples here like this papervision3d sample for 3d tweening)
3. Fusekit and ZigoEngine from MosesSupposes (updated as of late march early april development has started on an AS3 version – not sure of release so its sitting at third)

*All* of these kits allow for total control in a push mechanism to just push animation events onto clips in a dynamic way.  This gives maximum flexibilty for team development and easily changed transitions, or completely random movements.

Fuse has some nice stuff in the works for ColorFX, SoundFX, and even a PaperFX controller for papervision3D.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 8:35 pm and is filed under ACTIONSCRIPT, ANIMATION, ARCHITECT, AS3, DRAWING, FLASH. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.